Got a Rash, Man? St. Anthony and Machine Project Feel Your Pain.

One of the many pleasures of living in Los Angeles is that on any given night there are countless ways to divert your membrane from the mundane.

Tonight at 8:00 pm, Machine Project presents a lecture on a guy intimately familiar with diversions — St. Anthony, “the 4th century desert ascetic who was tortured by hordes of demons and would go on to become the patron saint of skin diseases.”

But wait, there’s more! According to the ephemera, the lecture, titled “Tempting St. Anthony: Epilepsy, Masturbation and Iconophobia,” will cover various depictions of St. Anthony during the Renaissance (including one by Heironymous Bosch, right); French novelist Gustave Flaubert’s lifelong obsession to retell the saint’s story; and topics as varied as, “epilepsy, ergotism, demonic posession, madness, [and] the scourge of masturbation and its relationship to capitalism.”